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The Promise and Challenges of Integrating Multiple Study Designs in Lifespan Developmental Inquiry
Johanna Drewelies (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin)
Individuals are dynamic systems that have evolved to interact with and adapt to continually changing environments. Lifespan developmental theory suggests that the tremendous heterogeneity in when and how individuals develop is a product of both equifinality and multifinality – multiple paths can lead to the same outcome, and the same paths can lead to different outcomes. Understanding this complexity requires that change be examined simultaneously at different levels of analysis – explicitly linking processes that manifest at one level of analysis with those at other levels of analysis. Using examples from my and others’ work, I illustrate some of the knowledge gained when study designs optimized for observing one or another dynamic are combined and integrated. In particular, I highlight insights gained from designs that link within the same set of persons observations obtained at multiple time scales – microtime (moments, hours, and days), meso-time (weeks and months), and macrotime (years and decades); in different research settings – lab-based experiments (e.g., emotion regulation), in-vivo daily-life assessments (e.g., emotional reactivity), and longitudinal panel inquiry (e.g., health decline); and from multiple entities –individuals, micro-systems (e.g., live-in partners), and macro-systems (e.g., physical, service, and technology characteristics of one’s living environment). In doing so, I will also discuss some of the practical and theoretical challenges researchers face when attempting to study the complex interplay among the many processes that contribute to developmental heterogeneity.
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